Alrighty! Time to get caught up on these blog entries! Translation: the conversion of something from one form or medium into another. I thought this was a pretty vague concept when we first decided on it. There are SOOOOOO many different seemingly unrelated things that could fall under the moniker of "translation." The act of talking, as well as hearing, as well as perceiving any sort of stimulus could apply to that definition. Thoughts translate into words in the mind, then the brain turns them into impulses that make the diaphragm contract and push air through a couple of little flaps of cartilage, the mouth and throat shapes the noises and PRESTO! Thoughts translated into speech. As I've been working on the UNCSA student film, The Watch, I've been thinking about how scripts translate into the multi-million dollar box office hits that explode across our cinema screens. Every step of the way is about trying to translate what was once a written medium, into a stunning visual masterpiece, but it's not as simple as putting pen to paper or brush to canvas. In filmmaking, half of the battle is just getting all of the right ingredients in the same place at the same time! I've been toying around with a graphic "translation" of what a single shot in a film looks like (above). It starts at the left with all of these different tangled colored lines, gradually, they start to align and straighten. Even the outliers start to fall in line eventually. Everything funnels into one singular white line representing a 2-minute-long take. CUT! Then everything falls apart again, but for that one moment, what was once words on a page translate to reality...hopefully it was in focus...
Don't you think the editing process is equally important. I always think of Roy Scheider in All that Jazz.
ReplyDeleteFilm Critic Chris Barsanti described it well: "It's a tough piece of self-examination, in which Gideon does horrible, selfish things to those around him, all for the sake of his work in film and theater, which seems to be the only thing keeping him alive. All That Jazz literally cracks open Gideon's life, a metaphor brutally realized when he finally collapses under the stress of working on the play and editing his last movie (which looks here like it's supposed to be his 1974 Lenny Bruce film, Lenny)."
I always think of those editing scenes and how by subtle edits, the film within the film actually gets better.